Swinney is still going out to bat for Matheson I see.
The FM says he accepts the conclusions that the parliament came to last night and says he didn't vote for the sanctions because he felt the process was tainted
Everyone knows if you are saying the process was tainted then you clearly don't accept the conclusions and outcome as fair. Weasel words can be used, you can even give in and allow punishment to take place, but you've made clear you don't don't think it is right. In which case it's worst of both worlds.
Most people instinctively like the idea. After about 5 minutes, the awful implications of it start to become apparent. The death penalty, even after what happened to the Post Office folk? If the polling reaction to NS is anything to go by, after a lot of noise, no change.
Though it would support my idea that this is an arsehole manifesto that only attracts arseholes. The negative vibes around the Conservatives are so bad I'm starting to wonder if Ed Davey's strategy of just *smiling* might really pay off.
I love how 25 days of service helping grannies has become the death penalty.
Are you criticising the nature of the analogy or of analogies in general?
I'm criticising how some people resort to hyperbole to make their point, which actually diminishes their point rather than enhance it.
Moldova is brilliantly mad. All the walnut trees belong to the state. They nationalised them - specifically - the walnuts
Someone should adopt that policy in the UK. Or maybe we could privatise drizzle
All conkers declared the property of the king.
Pretty much were. Collected for ammunition in WW1: fermentation to create acetone for cordite propellant, using the Chaim Weizmann process, hence eventually (so it was said) the Balfour Declaration.
Swinney is still going out to bat for Matheson I see.
The FM says he accepts the conclusions that the parliament came to last night and says he didn't vote for the sanctions because he felt the process was tainted
Everyone knows if you are saying the process was tainted then you clearly don't accept the conclusions and outcome as fair. Weasel words can be used, you can even give in and allow punishment to take place, but you've made clear you don't don't think it is right. In which case it's worst of both worlds.
There was some talk about right-wing conspiracy theorists and I don't think Carl Benjamin is one, he's just a bog-standard Faragist parrot, but another former UKIPper who does seem to have fallen off the reality train is David Kurten, ex London Assembly Member. Here he is chatting with Gareth "Son of David" Icke. https://youtu.be/PfNWIsjOaak
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
Indeed. I believe it’s our education system. Anti racism and Not Talking About Immigration has been drummed into them from the age of 5 so they don’t even have the language or bandwidth to talk about it or even conceive that it is an issue
Plus they can see the intense social pain inflicted on anyone that tries to talk about it, so their aversion is logical
Comparisons with education in the communist era of Eastern Europe are not entirely inapt. The guides here in Moldova have been explaining to me how they were brainwashed as kids to believe in the Soviet system even when it was clearly failing
You are a fucking dolt.
It is successive governments not building enough houses or schools or hospitals or whatnot that is the issue. Not immigration. The education and its detested focus on "anti-racism" has been hugely successful and means that the vast majority of our children are colour-blind (and XXX-blind also). Not everyone but broadly.
They - and you - should be campaigning for the government to be able to accommodate us all, not stopping some of us from being here.
That said, if you could do us all a favour and stay in the undoubted paradise that is Moldova rather than ever coming to the UK that would mean one more immigrant family able to move in to NW1. Hurrah!
Not enough housing for whom?
Everyone.
Everyone plus 2 million over the next 3 years?
You can leave if you think it might help.
You see how easily you slip into thoughts about excluding people due to competition for resources? The level of immigration is the biggest threat to the colour-blind (or anything-blind) society you want to protect.
We can never build enough for 'everyone' if 'everyone' continues to expand at such a rapid rate.
I was more thinking of self-exclusion.
We sort of can build enough for "everyone" unless you have an idea to restrict population growth. What was the stat the other day? Some ridiculously small percentage of the UK is built upon.
But that's not the point. The point, as small children from Hartlepool understand - and our very own Dura upthread pointed out - is that it is wholly within our power to cut immigration. But government after government has refused to do so. Governments are elected on a popular mandate to do stuff and we quite simply haven't asked ours in recent times to prioritise restricting immigration.
Richard Tice was on the radio this morning saying legal and illegal immigration needs attention so come July 4th we will see if the Great British Public, with a golden opportunity finally to do something about it, agrees with him and votes for Reform.
I wouldn't say "government after government has refused to do so". Immigration hasn't been consistently high for decades. See figure 2 at https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/long-term-international-migration-flows-to-and-from-the-uk/ It was not particularly high under Thatcher/Major. It rose somewhat under New Labour, dropped a little bit with the global crash, inched higher under Cameron, a bit lower under May, collapsed because of COVID-19, and then went stratospheric after Brexit. So, that reflects both global trends and government policies. When people talk about millions of immigrants, that's a post-Brexit thing. The EU allowed for labour mobility, but people came and went. After Brexit, the pattern of immigration is very different.
The vast majority of immigration even pre-Brexit was from outside the EU. EU membership was a scapegoat because free movement was used as a scapegoat for not restricting migration more generally.
There has clearly been a change in immigration numbers and pattern since we Brexited. The really big increases are since Brexit. Feel free to offer an explanation for what has happened. I suggest freedom of movement meant labour shortages could be filled without as much long term immigration.
The reason that non-EU migration exploded since Brexit is that it coincided with an extremely liberal government being elected, combined with the schemes for people from Ukraine and Hong Kong.
Boris Johnson took his finger out the dyke.
The general asylum right to any who make it here worldwide needs to end and, instead, we need to democratically choose how many and from where- like we did for Ukraine and HK.
That's where this battle is going next. Because it's really atm another form of free movement tempered by a little bit of cash and physical intrepidness.
Those seeking asylum are a small proportion of total immigrants. High immigration is from work and student visas.
Most people instinctively like the idea. After about 5 minutes, the awful implications of it start to become apparent. The death penalty, even after what happened to the Post Office folk? If the polling reaction to NS is anything to go by, after a lot of noise, no change.
Though it would support my idea that this is an arsehole manifesto that only attracts arseholes. The negative vibes around the Conservatives are so bad I'm starting to wonder if Ed Davey's strategy of just *smiling* might really pay off.
I love how 25 days of service helping grannies has become the death penalty.
Are you criticising the nature of the analogy or of analogies in general?
I'm criticising how some people resort to hyperbole to make their point, which actually diminishes their point rather than enhance it.
I agree, though if I suggested you've engaged in hyperbole about how dangerous Keir Starmer is would you agree?
Most people instinctively like the idea. After about 5 minutes, the awful implications of it start to become apparent. The death penalty, even after what happened to the Post Office folk? If the polling reaction to NS is anything to go by, after a lot of noise, no change.
Though it would support my idea that this is an arsehole manifesto that only attracts arseholes. The negative vibes around the Conservatives are so bad I'm starting to wonder if Ed Davey's strategy of just *smiling* might really pay off.
It's an absurd proposal. Lets set aside for a moment the practical elements of (a) the armed forces don't have the capacity to do this and (b) there isn't a framework of companies / providers to manage the mandatory "volunteering" program. Lets just look at the optics.
My daughter is a few weeks off her 13th birthday. So is in the firing line (geddit?) of this proposal assuming a Royal Commission does its job and puts recommendations in place.
What does that mean? As the Telegraph confirmed there is no room in the plan for people to have plans. No room for a gap year. No room for university. No room for a job, or even to start a business. You will "volunteer" and it will make you a better person. Because at 18 you would otherwise be a worse person and we will fix you.
No way is that going to happen. And that's assuming they fix the capacity issues in the armed forces and the voluntary sector. And we know what that will mean in reality - conscripts with little function in overstretched armed forces in horrible conditions, and an army of Tory contractors taking a ton of our money to create volunteering opportunities at the highest possible invoice price and the lowest possible cost.
I see it slightly differently, but the result is the same, or worse.
If there's 30,000 places in the forces for people to be trained as specialists, the army will select on prior experience which means it will largely go to privately educated CCF types to play soldier for the year. A nice little revolutionary guard for the ruling elite. Meanwhile everyone else will either be conscripted into gangs to pick fruit and veg, or else work in the laundry room at the local nursing home, etc. Doing jobs nobody else wants to do, on the bottom rung of the ladder.
Either way as an idea it's deeply authoritarian and will not create any sense of shared purpose or social cohesion.
There was some talk about right-wing conspiracy theorists and I don't think Carl Benjamin is one, he's just a bog-standard Faragist parrot, but another former UKIPper who does seem to have fallen off the reality train is David Kurten, ex London Assembly Member. Here he is chatting with Gareth "Son of David" Icke. https://youtu.be/PfNWIsjOaak
I sometimes wonder what it must be like to be close family with someone often ridiculed or reviled. There's a natural family desire to defend or go easy on them perhaps even if you don't share their views, though clearly some will break from families over such things, but what about the ones who actually try to follow in the footsteps of the father, the Andrew Giulianis, the Don Jrs, apparently the Gareth Ickes?
It puts me in mind of some those disgusting US 'preachers' who do nothing but get followers to give them money and live in mansions and buy private jets, a whole family business in some cases. How many of them believe what they are saying, and how many of their relatives who take part in it are just grifting or truly believe it?
I was gonna do a long impassioned comment about our blindness on migration but fuck it. The debate is so warped and stupid it’s not even worth it
Also I have just been to the world’s second largest wine cellar
And here you go, you utter, utter bellend.
With time peoples' attitudes become more progressive. Why this shouldn't happen with 2nd, 3rd, 4th generation muslims (or orthodox Jews) is not at all clear.
People's attitudes do not always become more progressive with time. You're extrapolating too much from your own lifetime.
Maybe. In Afghan they haven't (in the sixties the women were going around in mini-skirts). But they have in western liberal democracies and we are in a western liberal democracies.
No they haven’t. Again you’re provably wrong
Here’s the latest poll on Muslim attitudes. More 18-24 year olds than 55+ year olds want to make it illegal to show the prophet Mohammad in any form. Younger Muslims are much more anti Isreal and anti Jewish. And so on
The attitudes to homosexuality have barely budged in a decade. A 50/50 split on whether it should be illegal. Large minorities or actual majorities want sharia law across the UK, compulsory halal food everywhere, more traditional roles for women
It’s deeply depressing. This is what we are importing. This is incompatible with the liberal western democracy you proclaim to cherish
I can only conclude that you are literary too dumb and incurious to grasp all this, because I don’t believe you are that intellectually dishonest
What worse is that those of us over a certain age will ensure their views are marginalised. That’s the right thing to do but will radicalise them further, and 30 years from now there will be an issue.
I do worry about the current 18-21 demographic when it’s in power.
In the last French presidential election Macron came third amongst under 35s in the first round behind Melencon and Le Pen.
The only group Macron won in the first round was ironically over 60s and pensioners with Le Pen winning 35-60s
@JulianGallie What policies do each age group want to see in a manifesto?
Younger voters
Love the fact that immigration is an issue for the age group who need the immigrants most, because no-one else wants to look after old people because of how little that type of work pays.
Rather worrying that 'living' figures quite highly as a standalone.
'cost' is same size as 'living' in all four, so looks as if the actual phrase used is 'cost of living' and the algorithm has split it up and binned the 'of' (sorry Biggles).
Word clouds usually suck but that is riveting. Why do the youngest cohort (and nobody else) want truth, and what about? And note how cozzie livs completely evaporates for 65 plus and even pensions gets subordinate billing. Perhaps they really are as rich as everyone says.
The obvious question is where are 'woke' and 'trans', the key issues - as we all surely agree - of this election?
More pointedly, apart from the under 34s, “immigration” is prominent in every cloud
And yet where is the debate? The country has just experienced the most profound spate of immigration in its history. 2 MILLION people in 3 years. What do Labour intend to do about this? Why aren’t the Tories being challenged on this? Is it the national intention for this to continue? If not why not? If so, how do we house and educate and look after them all? Our public services are already breaking under the strain
It’s like this enormous issue does not exist. Madness
It’s still rather astonishing that the young can’t see the correlation between population increases and cost of housing increases.
Indeed. I believe it’s our education system. Anti racism and Not Talking About Immigration has been drummed into them from the age of 5 so they don’t even have the language or bandwidth to talk about it or even conceive that it is an issue
Plus they can see the intense social pain inflicted on anyone that tries to talk about it, so their aversion is logical
Comparisons with education in the communist era of Eastern Europe are not entirely inapt. The guides here in Moldova have been explaining to me how they were brainwashed as kids to believe in the Soviet system even when it was clearly failing
You are a fucking dolt.
It is successive governments not building enough houses or schools or hospitals or whatnot that is the issue. Not immigration. The education and its detested focus on "anti-racism" has been hugely successful and means that the vast majority of our children are colour-blind (and XXX-blind also). Not everyone but broadly.
They - and you - should be campaigning for the government to be able to accommodate us all, not stopping some of us from being here.
That said, if you could do us all a favour and stay in the undoubted paradise that is Moldova rather than ever coming to the UK that would mean one more immigrant family able to move in to NW1. Hurrah!
Not enough housing for whom?
Everyone.
Everyone plus 2 million over the next 3 years?
You can leave if you think it might help.
You see how easily you slip into thoughts about excluding people due to competition for resources? The level of immigration is the biggest threat to the colour-blind (or anything-blind) society you want to protect.
We can never build enough for 'everyone' if 'everyone' continues to expand at such a rapid rate.
I was more thinking of self-exclusion.
We sort of can build enough for "everyone" unless you have an idea to restrict population growth. What was the stat the other day? Some ridiculously small percentage of the UK is built upon.
But that's not the point. The point, as small children from Hartlepool understand - and our very own Dura upthread pointed out - is that it is wholly within our power to cut immigration. But government after government has refused to do so. Governments are elected on a popular mandate to do stuff and we quite simply haven't asked ours in recent times to prioritise restricting immigration.
Richard Tice was on the radio this morning saying legal and illegal immigration needs attention so come July 4th we will see if the Great British Public, with a golden opportunity finally to do something about it, agrees with him and votes for Reform.
I wouldn't say "government after government has refused to do so". Immigration hasn't been consistently high for decades. See figure 2 at https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/long-term-international-migration-flows-to-and-from-the-uk/ It was not particularly high under Thatcher/Major. It rose somewhat under New Labour, dropped a little bit with the global crash, inched higher under Cameron, a bit lower under May, collapsed because of COVID-19, and then went stratospheric after Brexit. So, that reflects both global trends and government policies. When people talk about millions of immigrants, that's a post-Brexit thing. The EU allowed for labour mobility, but people came and went. After Brexit, the pattern of immigration is very different.
The vast majority of immigration even pre-Brexit was from outside the EU. EU membership was a scapegoat because free movement was used as a scapegoat for not restricting migration more generally.
There has clearly been a change in immigration numbers and pattern since we Brexited. The really big increases are since Brexit. Feel free to offer an explanation for what has happened. I suggest freedom of movement meant labour shortages could be filled without as much long term immigration.
The reason that non-EU migration exploded since Brexit is that it coincided with an extremely liberal government being elected, combined with the schemes for people from Ukraine and Hong Kong.
Boris Johnson took his finger out the dyke.
The general asylum right to any who make it here worldwide needs to end and, instead, we need to democratically choose how many and from where- like we did for Ukraine and HK.
That's where this battle is going next. Because it's really atm another form of free movement tempered by a little bit of cash and physical intrepidness.
Those seeking asylum are a small proportion of total immigrants. High immigration is from work and student visas.
I know, and the asylum rules still need to change.
Most people instinctively like the idea. After about 5 minutes, the awful implications of it start to become apparent. The death penalty, even after what happened to the Post Office folk? If the polling reaction to NS is anything to go by, after a lot of noise, no change.
Though it would support my idea that this is an arsehole manifesto that only attracts arseholes. The negative vibes around the Conservatives are so bad I'm starting to wonder if Ed Davey's strategy of just *smiling* might really pay off.
It's an absurd proposal. Lets set aside for a moment the practical elements of (a) the armed forces don't have the capacity to do this and (b) there isn't a framework of companies / providers to manage the mandatory "volunteering" program. Lets just look at the optics.
My daughter is a few weeks off her 13th birthday. So is in the firing line (geddit?) of this proposal assuming a Royal Commission does its job and puts recommendations in place.
What does that mean? As the Telegraph confirmed there is no room in the plan for people to have plans. No room for a gap year. No room for university. No room for a job, or even to start a business. You will "volunteer" and it will make you a better person. Because at 18 you would otherwise be a worse person and we will fix you.
No way is that going to happen. And that's assuming they fix the capacity issues in the armed forces and the voluntary sector. And we know what that will mean in reality - conscripts with little function in overstretched armed forces in horrible conditions, and an army of Tory contractors taking a ton of our money to create volunteering opportunities at the highest possible invoice price and the lowest possible cost.
I see it slightly differently, but the result is the same, or worse.
If there's 30,000 places in the forces for people to be trained as specialists, the army will select on prior experience which means it will largely go to privately educated CCF types to play soldier for the year. A nice little revolutionary guard for the ruling elite. Meanwhile everyone else will either be conscripted into gangs to pick fruit and veg, or else work in the laundry room at the local nursing home, etc. Doing jobs nobody else wants to do, on the bottom rung of the ladder.
Either way as an idea it's deeply authoritarian and will not create any sense of shared purpose or social cohesion.
And of course. The elite will be financially compensated for their time.
THE Scottish Greens and Alba Party have been left fuming after being snubbed from a major TV debate.
It was announced on Wednesday night that STV is set to broadcast a televised debate between four Scottish party leaders.
On June 3, SNP leader John Swinney, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross and Scottish LibDem leader Alex Cole-Hamilton will feature in a 90-minute debate.
It does seem a fair criticism. Even if it is on the basis of Westminster representation Alba at least has some for now.
Day 2 of the jury deliberations in the Trump trial .
If they haven’t reached a verdict by the end of the day then I think it will end up a mistrial.
Yesterday’s request by the jury to hear certain testimonies again was seen by some legal experts as bad news for Trump. We can only hope !
The jury has today asked for several pages of the judges instructions to be read to them again.
They seem to be very thorough in their proceedings. It's possible 11 of them are running through why a pro-Trump juror is not discharging their duty as a juror.
I was gonna do a long impassioned comment about our blindness on migration but fuck it. The debate is so warped and stupid it’s not even worth it
Also I have just been to the world’s second largest wine cellar
And here you go, you utter, utter bellend.
With time peoples' attitudes become more progressive. Why this shouldn't happen with 2nd, 3rd, 4th generation muslims (or orthodox Jews) is not at all clear.
People's attitudes do not always become more progressive with time. You're extrapolating too much from your own lifetime.
Maybe. In Afghan they haven't (in the sixties the women were going around in mini-skirts). But they have in western liberal democracies and we are in a western liberal democracies.
No they haven’t. Again you’re provably wrong
Here’s the latest poll on Muslim attitudes. More 18-24 year olds than 55+ year olds want to make it illegal to show the prophet Mohammad in any form. Younger Muslims are much more anti Isreal and anti Jewish. And so on
The attitudes to homosexuality have barely budged in a decade. A 50/50 split on whether it should be illegal. Large minorities or actual majorities want sharia law across the UK, compulsory halal food everywhere, more traditional roles for women
It’s deeply depressing. This is what we are importing. This is incompatible with the liberal western democracy you proclaim to cherish
I can only conclude that you are literary too dumb and incurious to grasp all this, because I don’t believe you are that intellectually dishonest
What worse is that those of us over a certain age will ensure their views are marginalised. That’s the right thing to do but will radicalise them further, and 30 years from now there will be an issue.
I do worry about the current 18-21 demographic when it’s in power.
I’m 97% certain young white Britons will shift firmly to the right in the next decade - as they are doing across Europe. We are not immune to this trend we are merely 5-10 years behind it
Personally I’d prefer it if that wasn’t inevitable. If we hadn’t had so much immigration and we hadn’t pursued insane woke policies and if we hadn’t made young white men in particular such a target we wouldn’t have banked all this trouble. But we have and we did and the interest is slowly but surely accruing
When Labour fails to change the world, which they will, what happens then?
The real risk is that many give up on democracy and go to the extremes.
As long as they only vote for the extremes that is still democracy, even if centrism gets squeezed.
You think I don't know that? My point is not the election but what happened afterwards. Voting for extremists does not maintain democracy. See also Putin.
Comments
The FM says he accepts the conclusions that the parliament came to last night and says he didn't vote for the sanctions because he felt the process was tainted
Everyone knows if you are saying the process was tainted then you clearly don't accept the conclusions and outcome as fair. Weasel words can be used, you can even give in and allow punishment to take place, but you've made clear you don't don't think it is right. In which case it's worst of both worlds.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cv2292je77gt
There was some talk about right-wing conspiracy theorists and I don't think Carl Benjamin is one, he's just a bog-standard Faragist parrot, but another former UKIPper who does seem to have fallen off the reality train is David Kurten, ex London Assembly Member. Here he is chatting with Gareth "Son of David" Icke. https://youtu.be/PfNWIsjOaak
If there's 30,000 places in the forces for people to be trained as specialists, the army will select on prior experience which means it will largely go to privately educated CCF types to play soldier for the year. A nice little revolutionary guard for the ruling elite. Meanwhile everyone else will either be conscripted into gangs to pick fruit and veg, or else work in the laundry room at the local nursing home, etc. Doing jobs nobody else wants to do, on the bottom rung of the ladder.
Either way as an idea it's deeply authoritarian and will not create any sense of shared purpose or social cohesion.
It puts me in mind of some those disgusting US 'preachers' who do nothing but get followers to give them money and live in mansions and buy private jets, a whole family business in some cases. How many of them believe what they are saying, and how many of their relatives who take part in it are just grifting or truly believe it?
NEW THREAD
The only group Macron won in the first round was ironically over 60s and pensioners with Le Pen winning 35-60s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_French_presidential_election
The elite will be financially compensated for their time.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/24354327.scottish-greens-alba-left-fuming-stv-debate-snub/
THE Scottish Greens and Alba Party have been left fuming after being snubbed from a major TV debate.
It was announced on Wednesday night that STV is set to broadcast a televised debate between four Scottish party leaders.
On June 3, SNP leader John Swinney, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross and Scottish LibDem leader Alex Cole-Hamilton will feature in a 90-minute debate.
It does seem a fair criticism. Even if it is on the basis of Westminster representation Alba at least has some for now.
They seem to be very thorough in their proceedings. It's possible 11 of them are running through why a pro-Trump juror is not discharging their duty as a juror.
https://x.com/pippacrerar/status/1796174064714678501?s=61